McAfee and Brocade partner on network security

Security giant McAfee and networking firm Brocade have announced a partnership under which the two companies will produce a set of jointly designed network security solutions for enterprise customers.

McAfee's Firewall Enterprise and intrusion prevention technology will be made to interoperate with the Brocade NetIron MLX Series of high-performance routers to improve external threat protection, said the firms.

Brocade's ServerIron application delivery controllers, meanwhile, will help to load-balance the McAfee Firewall Enterprise product, ensuring optimum protection from denial-of-service attacks while maintaining availability and high performance, said McAfee.

The vendors also said that McAfee's Network Access Control solution would be engineered to interoperate with Brocade's FastIron CX and FastIron WS compact edge switches to secure the network access layer.

The new solutions are the first step in a multi-year agreement between the two companies which will next involve integrating network management data.

"Keeping data secure is a battle that must be waged on multiple fronts, especially at the network level," said Dan Ryan, executive vice president and general manager of McAfee's network security business unit.

"Working with Brocade to bring a comprehensive set of network security solutions to market makes perfect sense. The coupling of the strengths of both companies is expected to deliver a set of solutions that customers can depend on to protect their most valuable data assets."